Nulls
Kevin Bourrillion
kevinb at google.com
Wed Sep 26 15:13:02 PDT 2012
My teammate Colin and I discussed this some and:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:
> Trying again to categorize the choices and identify pros/cons...
>
> Seems like there are four buckets here:
>
> 1. Ban nulls. This means that feeding nulls into a Stream MUST produce
> an NPE.
>
This is more null-hostile than even we'd be comfortable with. Does anyone
actually back this?
2. Ignore nulls.
>
imho, way too surprising. Is anyone backing this?
> 3. Tolerate nulls. Streams API takes no position on nulls, but may well
> pass elements to less tolerant destinations (e.g., user-provided lambdas,
> user-provided collections, Optional constructor.) Nulls may cause NPEs in
> these cases.
>
This is both reasonable and what Guava does.
4. Embrace nulls. Ensure that every operation can deal with nulls in a
> well-defined manner. (This entails, for example, either dropping the
> Optional-bearing methods or making present Optional deal with null.)
>
I'm not sure what exactly this means when I supply a lambda that can't
handle null. You're saying the NPE thrown by that predicate should be *
caught* and handled somehow?
>
>
> I think its safe to say that for each of these, there is some subset of us
> who finds it undesirable.
>
> Doug proposed (2) and (4). I proposed (3). Nearly everyone has some
> sympathy for (1) but no one really wants to be that intolerant.
>
>
> Attempted summary of pros/cons:
>
> 1 PRO: Predictable, simple
> 1 CON: Might be overly harsh, interferes with when user might actually
> want to see nulls and can deal accordingly
>
> 2 PRO: Simple
> 2 CON: size() lies, interferes with optimizations, interferes with when
> user might actually want to see nulls and can deal accordingly
>
> 3 PRO: Minimizes distortion on API, implementation in the null-free case
> 3 CON: more complex reasoning about what might happen, op behavior may
> change subtly over time as implementation changes
>
> 4 PRO: Predictable
> 4 CON: sacrifices functionality/safety for sake of a corner case
>
>
>
--
Kevin Bourrillion | Java Librarian | Google, Inc. | kevinb at google.com
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